Cross-Cultural Aspects of Psychotherapy

Abstract

There are compelling reasons to take seriously the question of cross-cultural psychotherapy. With demographic shifts and movements of larger numbers of people into different cultural settings, the need for the clinician to be aware of various ethical, theoretical and practical issues becomes vital. There is some evidence to suggest that in the UK and elsewhere people from ethnic minorities are less likely to receive psychotherapy. In addition, there are gender, class and age biases in the delivery of services. The present paper addresses some of the issues in the delivery of services and charts various lessons from the USA and their applicability to the UK. The issues of ethnic matching (where both the therapist and the client come from the same ethnic background); cross-cultural aspects of client-therapist interactions and the underlying racist implications are discussed. Special attention is paid to various non-psychoanalytic forms of psychotherapy, such as cognitive and behaviour therapies, family therapy and humanistic therapies. Various therapies developed in other cultures are described.